Make URLs Consistent Across your Website and Use Canonical Links

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to URLs, and all of these different URLs

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are essentially, for search engines, separate pages

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that we could look at and say, well, there might

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be something different here.

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And you can imagine at 20 billion times a day,

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that could lead to a lot of inefficient crawling.

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So we prefer to have a single URL per piece of content.

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And there are two ways that you can do that.

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The first is to consistently use the same URLs

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across your whole website.

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So if you have internal navigation linked

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to the same pages, if you have a sitemap

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file, like Mariya mentioned, use the same URLs there.

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If you use anything to guide people to your websites,

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make sure you use the same URLs there instead

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of having these different patterns

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that all lead to the same thing.

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And secondly, one element that you can also use

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is the rel canonical link element,

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which is something you can place in the head of a page that

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tells us, well, search engines or Google, if you look

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at this page, this is actually the URL that I prefer

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you look at.

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This is the one that I want you to index.

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And together, this makes it a little bit easier for search

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engines to pick the right URL.

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So we have URLs covered.